Dorgan emerges as Obama's Dem foe

As the Obama White House pushes to reform Wall Street, control global warming, achieve energy independence and step up the war in Afghanistan, its real problem could be Sen. Byron Dorgan.

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“I’m not in Washington, D.C., to serve President Obama or to serve any interests other than the interests of this country or the interests of this state,” Dorgan said in an interview with POLITICO. “North Dakotans know — they know that I’m fiercely independent.”

For Dorgan’s sake, they’d better. The Democratic senator is up for reelection in 2010 in deeply red North Dakota, and the state’s Republican Party is eager to tie him tightly to the most liberal elements of President Barack Obama’s agenda.

That may be easier said than done.

Dorgan is skeptical of Obama’s choice of Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geithner to resurrect the economy, arguing that the two men helped build the financial system that is now in shambles.

Hailing from an energy-producing state, Dorgan holds critical committee positions that will allow him to push for expanded energy production and fight a global warming bill if it’s too tough on coal.

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As Obama asks for almost $84 billion for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Dorgan is prepared to employ his Democratic Policy Committee to hold oversight hearings to root out questionable spending and contracts the Pentagon issues for those wars.

Just days after Obama was inaugurated, Dorgan quietly created an informal working group with six other senators — Democrats Carl Levin, Tom Harkin, Dianne Feinstein, Maria Cantwell, Jim Webb and independent Bernie Sanders — to push the Senate and the administration to take a much tougher line against Wall Street.

Unlike the coalition of 15 centrist Democrats and one independent that Bayh and two others formed — a group that has no agenda and played a marginal role in shaping the budget debate — Dorgan’s group is very likely to grow in force should the president or the Senate Banking Committee push a regulatory reform bill the members deem to be too weak on Wall Street, aides said. Last month, six of the seven senators met at the White House with Obama, Geithner and Summers to raise concerns that Obama’s proposed policies would not go far enough to clamp down on the practices that brought down the financial system, according to several people familiar with the meeting.

In the interview, Dorgan said it’s too early to assess the tenure of Geithner and Summers. But when pressed about his views of the two appointments, the senator let out a laugh and said, “I expressed my views about this to the president.”

Dorgan, 66, is already preparing for a tough 2010. He raked in $1.3 million in the first quarter of the year and now has $2.7 million in cash on hand. As for a challenger, all eyes are on the state’s popular governor, Republican John Hoeven, who won a third term in 2008 with 74 percent of the vote. Hoeven, whose campaign committee had just $69,000 in cash on hand in February, is expected to make up his mind once the state Legislature finishes its session next month.

Donald Canton, a spokesman for the governor, said Hoeven didn’t want to “speculate” about the 2010 race and is “wholly focused” on the legislative session and the aftermath of the Red River flooding.